Because the Maze District is so remote, we had to bike in from the ranger station. (Fortunately, we could drive to the station--that would have added another 46 miles one way to our trip!) Well, we could have rented a 4x4 truck and just driven in, but where's the fun in that? (Translation: we're too poor.)

If you do a net search on the maze, you'll notice that biking is a pretty popular way to get in there. In fact, it seems as though that's the end in itself. (Well, there's also rental trucks. That seems to be for the rich though. Check out some of those prices! Wow!) Well, not with Mark and me. We wanted to see how good it was for climbing. No one on the net seemed to know how good the rock was there. In fact, everyone seemed to think we were crazy for even thinking about going in there with 30 pounds of rock gear and 30 fewer pounds of water than they would have taken. "There is no water in the Maze" seemed to be the general opinion.

That would have been it for the trip, but Mark had some experience out there. He'd never been the Maze, but he'd been hiking in both the Needles and the Dark Canyons--both times during the winter. He was pretty confident that water would be available. And, to be fair, a few people on the net seemed to think that water wouldn't be a huge problem. Some suggested making long hikes out to one of their favorite springs somewhere, for example.

So, off we went. We brought just about all of our climbing gear. We're not experienced at climbing on sandstone, so even if it was good, we didn't want to trust it. We were going to place cams all over the place! Later you'll see some pictures of our "super rack". We had at least two sets of each of our cams, and plenty of passive stuff, too. Heck we even brought some illegal pitons in case things got scary.

We brought quite a bit of biking gear, too. Spare parts and so on. We had a long debate before leaving: Do we bring bike helmets or climbing helmets? We thought we'd be more likely to get injured while biking, so we brought bike helmets.

And, yes, we brought a lot of water as well. Here's a photo of us right next to the car, with a 5 gallon carboy filled with water on my wagon. (More on the wagon later.)

That's the last you'll see of that. Actually, you can't even see it there. It broke about a half hour before we took that picture, so we filled up some good old 2-liter bottles with some of the water and tossed the rest. This worried Mark quite a bit, since several people on the net suggested carrying large quantities of water at the start. I wasn't too worried. The small patches of snow around led me to believe that things wouldn't be too bad. If it did get bad, we'd just turn around.

So, off we went. We paused to tell the rangers (more on them later) what we were doing, and then took off into the wilderness. The route we'd chosen was a bit circuitous, but that's what you get in this area. Everything is at one of three altitudes. The ranger station and Gordon Flats are at the highest elevation (about 6200'), the Elaterite Basin and the top of the Maze itself is about 1000' lower, and the bottom of the Maze is about 4500'. Everything else is very steep, so we had to choose our route between elevations carefully. Here's a map of the area with our route on it:

First we went through the Gordon Flats. This is almost a 2WD road, and it should have been easy. However, I was dragging along a wagon with pretty much all of our heavy gear and food. Mark had designed and built the wagon the week before while I was off visiting friends and family in California. Maybe it sounds as though I'm trying to absolve myself of any responsibility for that thing, and I'm not, really. Mark had worked pretty hard to make it as light as possible. Unfortunately, 100 pounds of gear on top of it made that less important than reliability. Well, eventually we figured out how to get it working. We used about 70 feet of parachute cord to hold the gear on and keep the forces on some of the flimsier parts of the wagon to a minimum. However, that took a lot of experimentation, so we weren't too fast on the first day.

Here's some photos of that section of the trip:

Okay, that part was easy. The first real (though comparatively minor) obstacle was the beginning of the Flint Trail. This is a steep section of road created in the 40s by the Department of Energy. It's not great road, but on a bike, who cares? We rolled right down it. The only hitch was that I forgot about the 100 pounds or so in the wagon, and burnt up both sets of brake pads. (I tried to go slowly!) That's okay. Brakes were unnecessary after that.

Anyway, we were impressed by the fact that trucks could make it down this road. That section of road more or less convinced me that I need to get rid of my little Nova and buy a cool truck. Here's some photos, but it was hard to get a sense of the angle of the road. (Really steep, but easily managable on bikes.)

When we got to the bottom, we ran into another minor problem. The ground was wet and muddy! That made the biking extremely painful, particularly with a heavy wagon behind you. So, we struggled for a bit, and then camped at the lip of a canyon. If nothing else, the campsites on this trip would be spectacular.

Before we went down on the Flint Trail, we got a great view of what we'd be up against the next day. In the next photo, you can see the road cruising off. We took the one to the left.

The next morning I managed to wake up Mark fairly early so that we could buzz over the mud while it was still frozen. (The nights are cold!) We made much better progress that morning, mostly because we'd figured out how to get the wagon to stay in one piece.

Well, that's not quite true. About halfway to the Maze itself, one of the wimpy bars on the wagon finally cracked. Fortunately, there's very little that can't be fixed with duct tape and paracute cord. Here's Mark using some local tools to fix it up:

Toward the beginning of the afternoon, we made it to the beginning of the Maze. However, just before that, the trail bumps into Horse Canyon. I got a good photo of Mark sitting on the lip, so I'll show it to you.